A Queens Teacher who collects a $100,000 salary for doing nothing spends time in a Department of Education "rubber room" working on his law practice and managing 12 real-estate properties worth an estimated $7.8 million, The Post found.

Alan Rosenfeld hasn't set foot in a classroom for nearly a decade since he was accused in 2001 of making lewd comments to junior-high girls and "staring at their butts," yet the department still pays him handsomely for sitting on his own butt seven hours a day.

In 2001, six eighth-graders at IS 347 in Queens accused Rosenfeld, a typing teacher who filled in for an absent dean, of making comments like "You have a sexy body," asking one whether she had a boyfriend and making others feel uncomfortable with creepy leers.

Because the Department of Education could not produce all the students as witnesses, he was found guilty in only one case. A girl testified that Rosenfeld stopped at her locker, where she was standing with a friend, and "said I love him because I talk to him so much."

A DOE hearing officer gave him a slap on the wrist -- a week off without pay -- for "conduct unbecoming a teacher." He was cleared to return to teaching.

Instead, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein has kept the scruffy 64-year-old in a Brooklyn rubber room, deeming him too dangerous to be near kids, officials said.

The DOE can't fire him.
"We have to abide by the union contract," spokeswoman Ann Forte said.
So Rosenfeld simply collects his $100,049 salary -- top scale for teachers -- plus full health benefits and the promise of a fat pension, about $82,000 a year if he were to retire today.

His pension will grow by $1,700 each year he remains. He could have retired at age 62, but he stays.

This is why unions do not belong in government paid jobs.Queens Borough pays his salary !

PoliCon

01-31-2010, 05:29 PM

Queens Borough pays his salary !

The government pays his salary. No job that is paid for from public funds should be unionized.

noonwitch

02-01-2010, 02:04 PM

It's easy for the school board to blame the union. What was wrong with them that they didn't negotiate a zero tolerance policy of all levels of sexual misconduct in their contract with the union? The union isn't as powerful as you may think when it comes to this kind of thing.

Teachers are like anyone else-if you give them the choice of keeping their dental plan or firing those among them who commit sexual crimes, you know the dental plan is what is going to stay.

megimoo

02-09-2010, 04:17 PM

Imagine if you could get full salary and benefits for a decent paying job and you didn’t have to work to get it. All you had to do was be accused of a crime.

What crime, you ask? How about molesting school kids? That’s what the teachers‘ unions in states like California and New York State are doing: coddling accused criminals — at your expense. And it’s probably going on elsewhere as well.

Believe it or not, New York is a lot tougher on them than California. From the New York Post:

At the beginning of his 32-year career as a math teacher in Queens, Francisco Olivares allegedly impregnated and married a 16-year-old girl he had met when she was a 13-year-old student at his Corona junior high, IS 61, the Post learned.

He sexually molested two 12-year-old pupils a decade later and another student four years after that, the city Department of Education charged. But none of it kept Olivares, 60, from collecting his $94,154 salary.

He hasn’t set foot in a classroom in seven years since beating criminal and disciplinary charges. Chancellor Joel Klein keeps Olivares in a “rubber room,” a district office where teachers accused of misconduct sit all day with nothing to do.

That would be $94K a year for sitting around drinking coffee and reading the paper. Sounds like a DMV job, without the actual “work.” The reason he wasn’t fired is “state laws” and “union rules.”

The unholy alliance of unions and government is one of the things that has led us to the mess we’re in now. When you can’t fire government workers, you’re stuck with the dregs sucking away tax dollars in the form of their bloated salaries and benefits.

And in many cases, they will get well-funded retirement packages for years of incompetence, thievery or worse. All in the name of “public service.”

But Olivares’s fate in New York is hard time compared to the Golden State. In California, accused teachers are paid to stay at home. In just the Los Angeles Unified School District alone, the cost of these teachers sitting on their hands is helping drive the state into bankruptcy.

About 160 teachers and other staff sit idly in buildings scattered around the sprawling district, waiting for allegations of misconduct to be resolved.

The housed are accused, among other things, of sexual contact with students, harassment, theft or drug possession. Nearly all are being paid. All told, they collect about $10 million in salaries per year — even as the district is contemplating widespread layoffs of teachers because of a financial shortfall.

Now you may say that these teachers were only accused, they well may be innocent. Yes, some of them may be. And hopefully the innocent will be cleared. But in many incidents, such as the Olivares case, there is no doubt because there’s a provable history, including a list of victims. And yet the state continues to pay his salary.

This is becoming a common practice in many states where teachers’ unions hold sway.

When they can’t fire them, in some cases schools have had to offer instructors cash payouts to quit. That’s right, cash bribes to quit after committing some kind of crime.

bribes

Unions and public sector jobs are the most unholy alliance of our times. These beasts should never have mated, because they’ve issued forth monstrous offspring in the form of dire consequences that no one probably saw coming. And many victims have been left in their destructive wake.

You have two bureaucracies with the dual intent of protecting their power at all cost and increasing in size every year. These goals lead to a sickening metastasis that rots both entities over time until they become bloated, cancerous threats to the health of the body politic. Public service jobs now pay more, offer more generous guaranteed benefits and are far more difficult to lose (in fact, almost impossible) than those in the private sector. The unions have made sure of that, and the result is that every private sector job is now viewed by an increasingly ravenous and rapacious government-union-lawyer complex the way a vampire eyes a tasty carotid artery.

It's easy for the school board to blame the union. What was wrong with them that they didn't negotiate a zero tolerance policy of all levels of sexual misconduct in their contract with the union? The union isn't as powerful as you may think when it comes to this kind of thing.

Teachers are like anyone else-if you give them the choice of keeping their dental plan or firing those among them who commit sexual crimes, you know the dental plan is what is going to stay.

In all my years, that is the first time I've heard that argument and if it isn't spot on to boot. :)

PoliCon

02-09-2010, 09:41 PM

It's easy for the school board to blame the union. What was wrong with them that they didn't negotiate a zero tolerance policy of all levels of sexual misconduct in their contract with the union? The union isn't as powerful as you may think when it comes to this kind of thing.

Teachers are like anyone else-if you give them the choice of keeping their dental plan or firing those among them who commit sexual crimes, you know the dental plan is what is going to stay.

The problem is that savvy students know that an accusation of sexual impropriety - factual or not - is a great way to get over on a teacher you don't like. Once the accusation is made - that persons career is over - again, whether there is truth to the claim or not. So . . . . I'm not sure I agree

noonwitch

02-10-2010, 10:17 AM

The problem is that savvy students know that an accusation of sexual impropriety - factual or not - is a great way to get over on a teacher you don't like. Once the accusation is made - that persons career is over - again, whether there is truth to the claim or not. So . . . . I'm not sure I agree

I understand what you are saying, but there are a lot of factors to be investigated whenever those kinds of accusations are made. Young ladies who lie about that kind of thing are frequently proven to be liars by their own peers. Zero tolerance doesn't mean firing someone without investigating the situation.

PoliCon

02-10-2010, 11:42 AM

I understand what you are saying, but there are a lot of factors to be investigated whenever those kinds of accusations are made. Young ladies who lie about that kind of thing are frequently proven to be liars by their own peers. Zero tolerance doesn't mean firing someone without investigating the situation.

I agree that there needs to be investigations and if the reality is the teacher is guilty - fire them. My point is that the unions are not going to do as you said earlier and chose their dental over protecting workers. Reality is that at least 1/4 of the teaching force needs to be fired for abject incompetence - the union leadership generally the most incompetent in the bunch - and they are not going to let that happen.

noonwitch

02-10-2010, 01:12 PM

I agree that there needs to be investigations and if the reality is the teacher is guilty - fire them. My point is that the unions are not going to do as you said earlier and chose their dental over protecting workers. Reality is that at least 1/4 of the teaching force needs to be fired for abject incompetence - the union leadership generally the most incompetent in the bunch - and they are not going to let that happen.

The 8th grade teacher who made girls rub his neck was one of the union bigwigs, in my district. He still got fired in the long run, but it's probably why the school didn't fire him for his first offense.